Jerry Learn <learn at u.washington.edu> said:
> I'm glad I provided you with an opportunity to tell us all about
> MIME and email.
I apologize. I had a tendency to write email that's too
tutorial-like. I meant no slur on your or anyone else's knowledge
of email.
The point of my response was to say that the criterion for
a file format should not be determined by the limitations of
non-MIME based email. In addition to the display problems
presented by some email clients there are hidden dangers present
in standard email. One of them is the ">From" issue I pointed out.
These are not well known but have consequences on sending files as
raw email text. There may be other considerations I don't know
about, esp. as regards non-unix mailers.
> If they want to name their sequences using "From yeast" and
> "From E. coli," then I ahve to hav a different discussion on
> how to name one's sequences.
That choice of names was for example purposes only. There's
no reason that something similar isn't going to happen. For example,
consider a program that merges multiple sequence records as the
following:
>sp|0001
AAAA
>gb|0002
AAAA
>sp|0009
merged into
>From sp|0001, gb|0002 and sp|0009
AAAA
In this case the author decided to make the comments of the merged
record more human readable.
Andrew Dalke
dalke at bioreason.com